apt – Can’t install Freecad from PPA in Noble

FreeCAD is available from the Ubuntu Universe repository, and can be installed via the Software Center or from the terminal:

sudo apt install freecad

Note: the Ubuntu Universe package may be outdated as the packaging may lag behind the latest stable source code. In this case, it is suggested to install the package from the -stable PPA below. In addition, installing the -daily package can be done to test the development branch.

Stable PPA version

Install the stable PPA via the Command Line Interface (CLI):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freecad-maintainers/freecad-stable 
sudo apt update 
sudo apt install freecad freecad-doc

Note: due to packaging problems, in certain versions of Ubuntu the freecad-doc package has collided with the installation of FreeCAD or one of its dependencies; if this is the case, remove the freecad-doc package, and only install the freecad package. If the freecad-doc package doesn’t exist, then ignore it.

Checking Installation

Once you have the stable PPA added to your sources using one of the above methods, the freecad package will install this PPA version over the one provided by the Ubuntu Universe repository. You can see the available versions with the following apt-cache command:

apt-cache policy freecad

Also you can visit Ubuntu Packages search website, search for freecad package like this example, download the appropriate package, and install it by sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/*.deb